The Mass-Metallicity Relation: A Fossil from the Star Formation History of Galaxies

DE ROSSI, MARÍA EMILIA

Horizons in World Physics

Nova Science Publishers Inc

Año: 2010; p. 371 - 388

In last years, there has been important progress in the understanding of the chemical evolution of galaxies because of the improvement of observational techniques and the development of more sophisticated numerical codes. In particular, in the Local Universe there is a tight correlation between the stellar mass and metallicity of galactic systems in such a way that brighter and more massive galaxies tend to be more metal-enriched (e.g. Tremonti et al. 2004; Lee et al. 2006). Moreover, this relation seems to evolve with time in the sense that, at a given stellar mass, systems were less enriched in the past (e.g. Erb et al. 2006; Maiolino et al. 2008). The chemical composition of a galaxy is of fundamental importance to study its formation and evolution as it is the result of the joint action of several physical mechanisms such as the star formation processes, gas infall, supernovae winds, the initial mass function and stellar nucleosynthesis, among others. Therefore, the determination of correlations between chemical abundances and other properties of galaxies and the study of how these relations evolve with time could provide important clues about possible galaxy formation scenarios (e.g. De Rossi et al. 2007, 2009; Finlator & Davé 2008). In this work, I will review some of the most important advances made in this sense in the last decades. I will focus mainly on the study of the origin and evolution of the mass-metallicity relation as a relic from the star formation history of galaxies.